With the hospital in disarray and by extension the Zotari soldiers, Alex and his group moved swiftly with little resistance. Any stray Zotari they found in the barren hallways either moved past them without noticing their presence or were promptly dealt with.

With each room they checked, their hope of finding anything related to the variants was starting to dwindle. The only thing they found were empty hospital beds or healing tanks. There was nothing that pointed to any type of nefarious research on live test subjects or even any trace of a variant in the hallways.

“Are we too late? Did they already move everything out?” Alex asked Krizzik. “I hope I didn’t take too long hunting. All the extra strength doesn’t mean anything we don’t even have the chance to face off against them.”

“I don’t think so. Besides, we only just found out about this place as a potential base of operations. It wouldn’t have mattered if you had come back two weeks ago, we would not have even known where to point you. From the schematics, there are still a few floors until we reach the bottom. I believe what we are looking for will be further down. They would want as much time as possible to defend their secrets if we had stormed the hospital. I do not believe they had anticipated our assault coming in so far below the surface. That should give us at least an hour before they are expecting us to reach them. We need to move quickly,” Krizzik responded.

“I hope you’re right.”

They moved floor by floor. The group didn’t spend too much time on the floors after they realized it didn’t have anything they needed. Every second they spent on the wrong floor could be the difference between finding the research and leaving empty handed.

They cleared the next three floors faster than they had cleared the first and they were starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Originally, they had been running into only a few stray Zotari per floor. On this last floor that number had seen a sharp increase. They weren’t combat oriented Zotari as they were extremely low leveled and easily handled. When Alex identified them, they had only been called Zotari as opposed to the normal Zotari warrior or one of the variant names. That led Alex to believe that they were essentially civilians. These would be the people in charge of a lab.

This gave Alex’s squad new breath and they continued moving downward. As Krizzik had posited, they found more evidence of experiments the further they moved down. The lower levels even looked like they would be the location of illegal experimental procedure. So much so that Alex wondered whether the Saxans were performing their own experiments before all this.

Are the Zotari just piggybacking off of Saxan technology? I sure hope not. I mean I guess that Krizzik did say that they would potentially use the variants to create a working version for the Saxans. Maybe they hit a wall in their research and are hoping to jumpstart it with some fresh ideas. Wait. Did they let the Zotari take Tristix?

The thought made Alex shiver. He wouldn’t put it past any government to do something like that. That didn’t make it right. He wondered how many people died when the city was taken over. And how many did it take for them recover what was lost? Did the potential gains truly outweigh the losses?

Alex didn’t think that Krizzik would do something like that, but maybe he just didn’t know. Then again there was no way for Alex to know if they had actually done that. He just had a sinking feeling that it was true, even if he couldn’t prove it.

It was on the seventh floor down from where they started that they ran into their first variant. It was one of the grey ones that would make you sick just by touching you. Alex hated these ones the most. Not because they were hard to deal with, they were just extremely annoying. He felt the after effects of their abilities for much longer than he cared for.

Fortunately, it was alone. Alex was able to keep it at bay with his Eonsteel. With sharp tendrils constantly engaging it, the grey Zotari didn’t get close enough to touch any of them and since this variant was much less durable than some of its counterparts, it didn’t even put up a good fight. In a matter of moments, the grey Zotari was a lifeless husk in the ground. The only movement was the sporadic spurts of blood that decorated the hallway and floor.

The Saxans hadn’t engaged on Alex’s insistence. He felt he would have little trouble handling the lone variant and that it would only make their encounter more difficult if they got involved. He was glad that they didn’t fight him on the issue. They trusted him, and that went a long way when you fought with a squad. The last thing anybody needed was a power struggle at an inopportune time.

The group moved past the corpse, careful not to step in any blood so as to not leave a trail. A spurt of blood shot up and hit Alex’s thigh.

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“Gah! Disgusting! Do you ever get used to that stuff?” Alex asked, his mouth contorted in disgust.

“You start to go numb to it, yes. I have noticed that your way of dealing with enemies is particularly violent and messy. It may take you longer to grow accustomed to it. I haven’t even grown accustomed to your methods yet. I find them particularly unnerving,” Krizzik responded, looking at the body with a look someone would give a particularly stinky trash bag.

“Hey! That’s hardly fair. I’m just using the tools at my disposal. You all just bludgeon everything to death. Sure, I do that too, but I also have a little finesse.”

Krizzik looked back at the body littered with holes.

“I’m not sure I would use the word finesse. Finesse would be in swift motion to finish it off.”

“He was moving around. It’s hard to hit a moving target. Plus, it’s not like I’m a master of Zotari anatomy. I don’t know where there vitals are.”

“You cannot go wrong with the head,” Nagaar said in his mind.

“Nobody asked you,” Alex retorted.

“I did not say anything,” Krizzik said.

“Not you, sorry.”

Krizzik shared a look with his kin before looking back at Alex.

“Well, you cannot go wrong with the head when you are fighting the Zotari,” Krizzik said.

Alex rolled his eyes, “I will keep that in mind.”

“That hardly seems fair. I gave the exact same advice. Why do you lash out at me, but accept his words? Do you think so lowly of me?” Nagaar asked.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Mostly, I just can’t focus on what you’re saying and what they’re saying at the same time. I don’t want you to chime in when other people are around unless it’s super important. I can’t keep it all straight. If you were your own person, or if other people could hear you too, maybe it would be different.”

“Now, that is an idea. I would not mind to be separate from you. You do have two more wishes after all.”

“I’m not going to use them on you. I have more important stuff to use it on.”

“Such as?” Nagaar asked dragging out the ‘s’ sound for longer than necessary. Alex was sure it was on purpose.

“It doesn’t matter. They’re my wishes and I’m gonna use them how I want.”

“You sound like my spoiled children,” the king teased.

“Alright, I’m ignoring you now. I gotta focus on where I’m going.”

The group had been watching Alex for a while as he moved his head side to side and his lips moved. He looked like he had been casting a spell. None of them said anything, but that unwavering trust they all had in him, faltered ever so slightly. Hard to fully trust someone that behaved slightly like a crackhead.

Not that Alex was a crackhead. He had only experimented with the gateway drugs. He was fully justified in his antics. They didn’t know that, but there was nothing Alex could do to change how they felt.

The group finished clearing the floor, and found only sparse notes on the variants. Hardly anything to write home about. So, down another floor they went.

It was like walking into a lion’s den. They could only see out the narrow stairwell, but what they could see gave them pause. They had gone multiple levels seeing at most three Zotari on any given level. They had grown accustomed to it and seeing so many Zotari had shocked them.

They didn’t want to rush blindly onto the floor, but at the same time, they couldn’t just wait in the stairwell. There wasn’t much they could do with the limited information they had, so there was no sense in rushing back up the stairs to plan. They waited for an opening, and moved out when they were free from prying eyes. They huddled behind some crates and looked out.

This floor was different than the others. The majority of the others were a series of hallways that lead to individual rooms. This floor was essentially a large open space with room around the perimeter. The lighting was suboptimal. It felt like a warehouse you would find on an abandoned dock. There were large cylindrical pillars throughout the room holding the ceiling up. Tents were set up all over. There was a bustle in the crowd. Everyone moved with purpose and Alex could hear the fruits of their labor.

Screams filled the air. He could hear the sounds of someone fighting against restraints and a Zotari yelling at others to restrain the struggling patient. It gave Alex an uneasy feeling.

“Are they doing this against their will? Or do you think they signed up for this?” Alex asked.

“I do not know, but they are doing a lot of it,” Krizzik said as he gestured to various parts of the room.

As if on display, there were variants located throughout the room. They stood in squads made up of the different variant types. There were the brutes, the grey ones, and the giants. He didn’t see any of the deranged variants and felt that was for the best. Just one of those had nearly been enough to annihilate him. It had taken nearly everything he could muster to beat it.

There was also the matter of that commander. He had somehow possessed multiple abilities, but hadn’t looked any different. If they had succeeded in making one, how many more were out there? Would they even be able to tell it was one before they fought it? The commander had appeared as a normal Zotari. If that was the case with all of them, any battle could turn dicey at the drop of a hat.

After some discussion, they decided they needed to find a more enclosed area to plan their next steps. They would need to gather as much research as they possibly could before planting the bombs they brought with them. This would need to be done both silently and quickly. For their staging point, they felt one of the tents should prove to be a safe space. They would just need to vacate it of its current occupants.

The group watched for a while longer. They discounted several of the tents because they had far too many Zotari inside. They instead chose one that was likely mostly empty. They hadn’t seen anyone go in or out for nearly the entire time they watched. It was also a great pick because it sat on the perimeter of the room offering easy access while also making further movements quicker. On Krizzik’s mark, the group hustled to the tent and inside.

It was not empty.